


The Elm, The Ash, and The Linden Tree

by fujiidom



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Saturnalia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-26
Updated: 2011-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-28 04:52:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/303935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fujiidom/pseuds/fujiidom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Penny is a writer that procrastinates and Sheldon is her put upon editor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Elm, The Ash, and The Linden Tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gertie_flirty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gertie_flirty/gifts).



> Written for the [Very Merry Saturnalia Fic Exchange](http://sheldon-penny.livejournal.com/tag/%21a%20very%20merry%20saturnalia%3A%202011) at Paradox.
> 
> I hope I did this anything resembling justice because (I interpreted the term _editor_ very lightly and) this is easily one of my favorite tropes and I know I identify with Penny enough as it is, so putting her in this position was kind of brutal. If I didn't already bequeath my life and love to [weasleytook](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/weasleytook) on a daily basis, I'd be doing it for the first time, here. Thank you for making this look halfway legible.

**183.**

Penny is multi-tasking like it is an extreme sport when her doorbell rings early on a bleak Monday morning in September.

It’s hard to get all your credit card numbers copied to the billing fields to checkout your newest pair of boots from Zappos while rewatching one of your favorite (read: sickest) episodes of _Criminal Minds_ while daydreaming about what Reid would be like in bed while putting a second coat of nail polish on your toes while waiting for a frozen burrito to warm up in the microwave.

While writing a book.

Somehow the most important action always ends up happening in the background. It’s in a word document buried beneath sixteen tabs, an abandoned game of spider solitaire, and the hum of noise in her apartment. But it is there, haunting her subconscious, working on a really nice ulcer somewhere in her gut, and making her feel like an all-around horrible person.

Hence the burrito.

But before she can spiral out of her distractions into a night of trying to write and hating herself and trying to write some more and hating herself even more, there’s a gunshot onscreen that makes her yelp out in shock. Then, making her shout out even louder (and more unfortunately drawing her attention away from where Reid was handling a gun for his first time of the series, this really was one of her favorite episodes, damn), comes the doorbell.

Instantly she’s terrified, in the way that only someone watching a six hour block of _Criminal Minds_ episodes while Wikipedia searching killology and famous abductions off and on can be. For whatever reason, one that made sense at the time, she grabs her trusty Louisville Slugger from her umbrella stand and sticks an eye against the peephole.

The gangly, Norman Bates-looking stranger on the opposite side of the door seems to know she’s looking through the small fish-eye lens and stares right back at her, dead-on.

She grips the bat tighter. “Who’s there?”

“Dr. Sheldon Cooper, Ph. D.” Penny pulls her head slightly back, tries to do a quick skim-through of her mental rolodex of names, and falls short of anything coming to mind. Again, as if he realizes what she’s doing, he looks impatiently at her door. “I’m with your publisher.”

 _Oh, no. Oh, no no no no. No._ And her mind is already off, trying to come up with the social equivalent to an escape hatch. The microwave pings and she isn’t doing anything beyond cursing over and over as she grits her teeth.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she starts, blind, hoping that something quick and intelligent just happens to pop out of her mouth. “I’m sure you’re really nice but I can’t open my door to some random off the street. If you or Beacon need anything they can just leave it in my mail box or call me in advance and set up a meeting time, whatever.”

He clears his throat and for a brief, wondrous moment of time she thinks he’s bought it. Sometimes guys hear a girl meltdown into a frenzy and they’ll do just about anything to avoid dealing with it. Unfortunately, this one must’ve had sisters. Or a really involved mother.

No sooner has she let herself start to smile and think about sinking her teeth into that terrible-smelling burrito than her cell phone starts ringing. She runs off to get it without thinking and since she’s mostly sure he’s still outside, letting it ring would be awkward. She hits answer on instinct just as she notices the call’s coming from her publisher and feels the horrible situation sink itself securely atop her shoulders.

“Hello, Penny. This Amy Farrah Fowler with Beacon,” says a monotone voice through the speaker of her phone.

“Hiiiiii,” she stretches out the small word for what feels like a full minute. Is she cringing? It feels like she’s cringing, but she can’t feel her face and is pretty sure this is what an out-of-body experience is supposed to feel like.

“I have one of our agents, Dr. Cooper, on the line for you,” she continues, as if it weren’t the most ridiculous thing to be doing while said agent stands less than ten feet from where she’s pacing.

She contemplates trying to redirect the conversation but she hears the other woman hit a button and the opportunity is lost in the next second.

“Hello, this is Dr. Cooper. I’ve been hired to help you get over your writer’s block. I’ve been tasked to get you writing, but if you’d rather me read a book or watch movies on my iPad outside your apartment, I’m happy to let you flounder away your credibility while I get paid to sit here.”

 _This_ asshole. To think she’s been a second away from dropping all pretenses and apologizing and just letting everything about her failure to produce a second novel as promised out in the open. Thank god she didn’t because if she’d found out he was this kind of arrogant prick after having opened her door to him, she’s not sure she would’ve ever forgiven herself.

As it stands, she lets the baseball bat’s handle roll back across her knuckles, grabbing it before it can fall to the floor, adrenaline peaking delightfully.

Her father once told her that there were several things that hunting could teach you about the real world. Most important, he always said, was having a strong stomach.

If you aren’t prepared to watch the life drain from something, you’re not cut out for this business. Okay, her father’s always had a pretty weird sense of humor. But that really does ring true, sometimes, when Penny finds herself in the tricky position of crushing someone’s spirit.

Usually this is relegated to romance and fiction (the two not being mutually exclusive, of course), but she’s always open to new experiences.

She holds down a number key with her finger until she hears him bump against the door, flinching at the shrill electronic screech, then hangs up.

His huff is audible through her thick door. She taps the door chain lock, pointedly, and twists the deadbolt to the left with a grin. “Nice to meet you, Doc.”

Turns out, lukewarm chimichangas are actually quite delicious.

 

 **190.**

He shows up again, the next day; rings her bell and everything.

She doesn’t even bother getting up.

 

 **197.**

It’s not until the third week has passed that she realizes his appointments must just be for Monday mornings. It makes her a little less proud that she’s thought him to have been building up confidence to return only to have his hopes dashed.

Playing Selena Gomez songs at full volume does make her feel a little better about the situation, however.

 

 **  
204.**

She doesn’t realize that he’s been staying from nine to five.

When she’s done her morning annoyances (what’s she’s thought to have driven him off, based on the view from her peephole), she realizes she’s expecting something from Amazon that morning. She throws on a pair of shoes and opens the door to run down the stairs to where they deliver her mail.

He’s sitting with his back to her door, head slumping against the wall and ear buds in both ears. He probably wouldn’t have even noticed her if she weren’t the type to scream when surprised.

He bolts upright as she runs back into her apartment and slams the door behind her, locking it thoroughly.

There’s a second where she’s genuinely unnerved to the point where she needs a visual to work with and peeks as silently as she can out at the hallway through the lens. He looks so different than she remembers, wires wrapped haphazardly around his neck and panting just a little. He looks disappointed and annoyed and maybe just a little sad.

Well, now she _can’t_ open the door ever because she feels like the real jerk here.

She tries to replay his words from their first meeting over and over again in her head, to make herself feel like she’s not being a bully. This was still an ambush, even if it’s over the span of a month.

She wonders what rock bottom _really_ feels like, if this isn’t it.

 

 **  
205.  
**  
There’s a moment where she’s so desperate to write that she starts crying. Then just as quickly (and frantically) she’s sponging at her laptop keyboard with her shirt’s sleeve.

If she could just secretly write the follow-up to her first story and leave it surreptitiously on her doormat, then she’ll never even have to deal with the awkwardness of talking to this guy.

She’s already made it as painful as possible, for both of them. It’s been over six months since the deadline’s has passed, she’s refused to let him in for a full month, and she’s basically the emotional equivalent to a six-year-old.

It’ll be better for everyone if she just gets herself together and writes. All that would require is for her to stop focusing on feeling like even more of an asshole than normal and, y’know, _write_.

It’s one more thing she can fail at in spectacular fashion, at least.

 

 **211.**

 _I’ve worked with actual agoraphobics who were easier to deal with than you._ says a note that slides under her door at 5:01PM.

Wow, so. Maybe she’s been blaming herself too heavily here. Sure, she’s behaving like a child but it takes one to know one.

 

 **  
218.  
**  
She waits for him to find her note that morning. She’s been perfecting it all week.

Her first draft being, _I’m actually uglyphobic and deeply offended by your accusations. And face._ Her later edits aren’t quite so basic, but the general sentiment’s still there.

 

 **  
225.**

There’s corn being eaten somewhere in her apartment complex. She senses it, almost preternaturally, before smelling it. Maybe it’s the Nebraskan blood in her veins or just her empty stomach trying to help her get the hint.

After a few minutes of wondering which of her neighbors would be eating corn in the middle of the day during a work week, she realizes it’s probably not a neighbor at all.

He sits there, from nine to five, every Monday.

Of course he brings food. (God, does she loathe how much that humanizes the cyborg monstrosity she’s built up in her head.)

 

 **  
232.  
**  
Her mother calls late Sunday night to tell her some good, some bad news about her grandfather. It’s a terse conversation because it’s a phone call and Penny knows it’s killing her mother that she’s not returned home by now.

She wants to; she will. When things come to that.

But, she lives here now. Her life is here, her work is here, and she’s still waiting for her parents to understand and accept that. Instead, they seem content to pester her until she comes back to Nebraska and helps tend the farm while she writes.

It’s writing, right. You can do it everywhere. Not really. She’s been shit at doing it _anywhere_ , lately.

That doesn’t mean, however, that living in the same zip code as her parents is an option worth putting back on the table in any way, shape, or form.

With her malice beaten down temporarily and twice her normal amount of shame, she doesn’t bother with the theatrics or normal slights at her wayward guest.

He rings the doorbell and she can hear him sit on the stairs before he bothers wait for a response.

It’s a stupid reason to cry, but she’s been looking for one for hours and it’s more than happy to help push her over the edge.

She makes sure that it’s as close to silent as she can get when she slips a note under the door frame. _What did you bring for lunch, today?_

It’s only outside for a minute before it slips back in; his neat (of course) handwriting scrawled across the bottom half of the sheet. _Ham and cheese on rye. Apple. Fruit punch._

She has to flit back to her bedroom, as far out of ear shot as she can get in her apartment, so he can’t hear her sobbing.

 

 **  
239.  
**   
_What’d you bring, today?_

It’s been taped to the outside of her door for an hour, so she hears him pull the paper down to read before he’s even rung the bell.

 _Tolstoy and chicken salad._

She wonders briefly if that’s a joke, given how long Tolstoy’s notorious for being. But given their brief history (as literally one-sided as they’ve been, even still) that doesn’t seem likely.

After almost five minutes of wondering if it’s lame to tell him what she’s eating in return, followed by another five minutes of staring into her refrigerator and wishing she had the makings for chicken salad, she grabs a pen from her junk drawer.

 _Just peanut butter and jelly on an English muffin for me._

 

 **  
246.  
**

 _Oreos and milk, you?_ she waits for him to finish writing so keyed up that she jumps a little when he finally rings her bell.

 _That’s incredibly unhealthy. BLT sandwich and the _Indiana Jones_ trilogy._

She can’t help but snort at his response because if she’s learned one thing about this guy it’s that he’s a pot willing to call every damned thing in the kitchen black.

 _Really? The guy eating bacon is telling me I’m unhealthy?_

She dips two Oreos, one in each hand, in her small bowl of milk and tries to eat them smugly at the door, as if he could see or appreciate the act.

 _Oreos as a meal choice = unhealthy. I like Oreos. I like milk. They are not lunch, they are a snack. You are not a pre-schooler._

Well, he has a point, but cravings are cravings and she doesn’t need to explain herself to anyone.

 _I think you’re just jealous._

 _I assure you, I’m not jealous._

 _Exactly what a jealous person would say._

 _Except when I’m saying it, since I’m not jealous._

She doesn’t know what else to do, so she just puts two Oreos on the sheet of paper and slides them under the door, careful to avoid jamming them or knocking them accidentally onto the floor.

She can hear him scoff slightly and question the hygiene of eating off of something on the floor, but when he sends it back, there’s no Oreos.

 _A little dry._ She laughs, deep and for a few solid seconds, but when she’s done she has to get up and distract herself with something on TV because it’s basically like they’re having a conversation and that’ll just make things ten times more awkward next week.

 

 **  
252.  
**   
_Kickass meatball sandwich._

 _Leftover eggrolls and Ursula Le Guin._

 

 **  
259.  
**  
When there’s a knock at her door, she gets almost worried for a second. He rings the bell, slides the paper under her door, and goes off to read on the steps between her floor and the one below.

Instead there’s a knock, once, twice, then three frenzied times. “Can I use your bathroom?” he voice squeaks through the door separating them.

“Uhhhhhh,” she says staring back, unsure of what to do.

“I wouldn’t ask because I don’t enjoy using other people’s bathrooms but I had an extra cup of tea this morning since I didn’t get much sleep last night and was feeling more tired than normal and--- and I could really use a bathroom because that leaves a public restroom or trying not to lose control of my bladder during the trip back to my house which is at least twenty minutes on a bus and longer if I call a cab and—” he trails off as Penny opens the door.

She continues to stare blankly at where he’s more or less _hopping_ up and down. When he does nothing but gaze back at her in shock, she widens her eyes to remind him.

He takes off down the hall and tries three different doors before bursting into her bathroom and shutting the door firmly behind him.

Penny sees his small leather satchel sitting, forgotten, next to her door and brings it inside. Her neighbors aren’t that petty, or anything, but it feels like the polite thing to do.

He’s out after only a minute or two, immediately awkward and silent.

He glances at where his bag is sat atop the counter, even more wary. “I can go back outside, if you’d rather—” he begins before she interrupts.

“No, no. That’s stupid you’re here, you’ve been coming here for almost four months. It’s stupid.”

Pulling himself to full height, she can almost _see_ the reticence evaporate from his face. “No arguments, here.”

“Well, maybe if you weren’t such a jerk to me on the phone the first time we spoke, I wouldn’t have been so quick to lock you out.”

“I was being honest. Clearly I have shown up and done exactly as I said I would for an entire quarter of this year.”

Penny grumbles at that. Yes, he’s not lying. No, that doesn’t make it okay. “That doesn’t give you carte blanche to be an asshole.”

“Actually—”

“Uhhhhhh _gggggggggggh_.”

They go back and forth until she’s locked herself in her bedroom and he’s shouting that it’s time for him to leave through the door over the sound of her laptop’s tinny speakers blasting Rihanna.

 

 **  
266.  
**  
Same thing, different day.

Only she plays Coldplay _and_ Rihanna on repeat, this time. There’s five full minutes of him groaning in frustration that she hopes her memory always lets her keep vivid.

 

 **  
272.**

It’s much more endearing to smell chicken salad from her hallway, through the crack in her door. Now that he’s sitting at her table, unsnapping his annoying little Tupperware holders and taking swigs of Sprite Zero in between bites, it’s deeply gross.

She really considers going back to keeping her door locked, that afternoon.

 

 **  
279.  
**  
He’s been giving her the last names of authors because he brings more than one book of theirs to read.

She sits in front of him and watches him flip page to page through the first of four Stephen King books he’s taken out of his bag, not spending more than half a minute on any of them.

Somewhere after reaching the quarter-way mark in _Different Seasons_ , he notices her studying him. “Can I help you with something? Tips on writing, perhaps?”

“You can’t really be reading these books.”

He sighs and shuts the book after slipping a small plastic page saver around a corner. “Speed reading is a well-known hobby. Two of our presidents were avid speed readers.”

“Yeah, right. The weirdo ones, maybe.”

“John F. Kennedy’s said to be many things, but I’m not sure that ‘weirdo’ was ever one of them.” He looks the epitome of unimpressed and part of her wants to keep pressing whatever nerve she’s hit just to prove that she can rile him.

“What’s the fun in reading if you’re doing it page by page?”

“I bring four to five books a day, when I come here. I’d say getting that much material read is much more ‘fun’ than whatever element of enjoyment you presume is missing from the process.”

“Here, give it.” She grabs his book and scans the page, a grin splitting across her features. She reads the rest of _Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption_ out loud.

Then _Apt Pupil_ , then _The Body_ , and _The Breathing Method_ after that.

If it keeps him there thirty-three minutes past five, they pretend not to notice.

 

 **286.**

She’s in the middle of pouring tea when the doorbell buzzes.

Embarrassed that she’s already pulled two mugs out of her cabinet, she puts one back up and waits until he’s come in and takes his regular seat at her table.

“D’you want?” she mumbles in his direction, nodding back at the kettle.

“Sure.”

“Cream? Sugar?” she asks.

“Both, please.”

It’s not until she’s sat next to him at the table that she notices he has her book in front of him.

She fights the very real urge to pour the tea into his lap. He’s (been) being a jerk, but that’s a level of vengeance she’s reserved for her asshole exes.

The ones she hasn’t libeled in the novel in question, at least.

Instead, she sits and rather stonily slides his mug across the area between them.

“Why do you have that?”

“I thought you could read this aloud, today.” His tone is so matter-of-fact that she really regrets not having upturned the tea all over his khakis.

“No.”

“You read almost three quarters of an entire collection of short stories. Surely you can handle something that you wrote yourself?”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re doing but I thought we had a nice thing going and now you’re totally ruining it with this asshole routine from before and it’s really tired and—” Penny stops talking when she watches him crack open his copy of _The Big Orange_.

The next few hours drag by slower than any other she can remember living through, her head hiding under her crossed arms the entire time.

 

 **  
293.  
**  
“I shouldn’t even let you in, today,” she says over a yawn.

“Why’s that?” he asks, seeming genuinely curious. How on earth can he be curious about it when he basically eviscerated her life’s work so far, just a week ago, is beyond her.

“Um, do you forget the part of last week where you made me feel like a piece of shit for four and half hours?”

“What?” He hasn’t even sat down; he’s so confused and upset by her words.

“You read my book out loud and not only reinforced the feeling of being the worst failure in the world for being nearly a year past deadline, but you made me feel stupid about the only success I’ve had so far. So if you could just tell me about how the company wants to drop me, fine. I’m not going to sit here and feel like a punching bag for another week, though.”

He sits, his face the most readable she can remember it ever being, and lays his hands flat against the table. Then something steels inside him and it looks more like humility or shame, for what she’s not sure, but maybe she’s gotten to him. She’s glad.

Instead of apologizing or conceding her points, he meets her unsteady gaze sharply, his tone flat and plaintive. “I haven’t written anything in ten years.”

Wait, _what_. Her mind slams to a halt and she feels around for a chair back before slipping into a seat across from him. “What are you talking about?”

“I have written seventeen books, two hundred and five academic articles, six op/ed pieces for the Los Angeles Times, and ten years ago I just…” he trails off and opens his hands where they lay on the table, palms up, arms tense, pleading to some imaginary entity to stop torturing him. She knows the feeling, the movements, all too well.

“Stopped?” she answers for him.

“Stopped.”

“Why do you do this, then? Isn’t it worse to see other people in the same position? Is that preventing you from—”

“No. It’s not. If anything, it’s made me more hopeful that it’s still just a temporary hell.”

“Temporary?” Penny looks around the table, never one to parse words for someone else’s sake. “Ten years?”

“Now you understand why I take your trouble so lightly.”

Penny doesn’t want to give him that much leeway to annoy her with, but she can’t help the small jerk of her head in agreement. A year has been unbearable. Ten years of this? No wonder he’s such a lunatic.

“What have you written? Anything I would’ve read? Anything I can read?”

He puts his head in his hand for a moment before pulling out his iPad and tapping a few things onscreen. He pushes the tablet in front of her and she squints to read the long title on the eBook he’s pulled up. _Isolated Thermodynamic Systems and the Extensive Variables That Make Them Homogenous In Equilibrium_

“Is this even written in English?” she asks.

“Most of it,” he answers, easily.

“I—wow, I don’t even know what to say. Just, okay. I guess it’s definitely option B, then.”

Before he can do more than furrow his eyebrows, she starts reading.

It’s over three-hundred and fifty pages, most of which she stumbles over pronunciations or the mathematical terms needed to explain the graphs and charts. She sees him wince on occasion, but even though they’ve read well through dinner time, she finishes it.

They have to plug his iPad into a charger halfway through and her voice is a little hoarse, but somehow even completely unrelated to her own writing, this feels like progress.

 

 **300.**

“My goal for you is to have five thousand words written by the end of the year.”

“Look, Mr. Cooper—” She stops almost as quickly as she starts because that shouldn’t sound so awkward, but wow it does.

“Dr. Cooper,” he says, distractedly. “Sheldon.”

“Sheldon,” she repeats, like it’s nothing. Like this isn’t the first time she can remember saying his name out loud. “That’s easy for you to dish out, but as embarrassing and stupid as it probably is, I don’t want to set up any lofty goals so long as I’m struggling.”

“So long as you’re struggling, lofty goals are the only thing that will keep you from completely falling apart.”

“Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but—”

“Has this been working for you well?” he asks, bluntly. He looks around the apartment for emphasis and she knows he’s right but she’s just so stubborn. It’s her fatal flaw, probably, but if she’s going down then she’ll bring every person in the vicinity down with her.

“Fine.” An expression of deep smugness flits across his face for just a second and she almost grins in anticipation of how he’ll react to her follow-up bombshell. “But only if you write the same amount.”

Icy and blank, he just stares at her. “I didn’t agree to that.”

“And you don’t have to. But that’s the only way I’m doing five thousand words.”

She picks up her laptop and pretends to pull up a word document.

He wants to run from her apartment and call his boss and get her kicked off the company label, she can tell by the heat in his glare. For a second, she thinks this was just a way to call his bluff, but she instantly knows she’s misjudged him.

Now, all she can do is hope that if he does put that anger towards trying to match her word count, it’ll happen with the stipulation that he’ll be in even more agony than she is.

His gaze is finishing shifting into something that most closely resembles sinister when he pulls out his iPad with a tilt of his head. “Deal.”

They get five thousand words written, a piece, before it’s even time for lunch.

 

 **  
307.  
**  
She’s barely been able to pad her final word count from last week with another dozen or so words in the week’s span between their meetings and she hopes he doesn’t ask her about it. Lying isn’t exactly a weak spot, but feeling bad about it on the inside is.

Instead, he comes in and is clearly miserable. He has a Macbook Pro tucked under his arm in a laptop sleeve and seemingly nothing else.

“Have you slept?” she asks, genuinely concerned for a moment.

She pours a glass of water and puts tea on while she watches him gulp down half the cup.

“A little,” he squeaks out. The glass makes a loud sound when he sets it down on the table. He pulls out his laptop and lazily plugs everything in before tapping a few keys and logging in. “Have you written anything since last week?”

She blows a puff of air and waves. To someone halfway decent at reading body language, she would’ve given herself away completely. Instead he just hangs his head and opens up his writing application.

“I’d show you, but I have to add the finishing touches to this chapter. You know, just get a few things straight before starting on the next one.”

It’s a bold-faced lie, she knows, one she feels terrible about instantly after saying it. But she’s sat in front of her computer for no more than five minutes of pretend typing and editing before she actually starts adding to what she’s written so far.

Before long, she adds another thousand words to the pile and has to pull up a second document to get down some meandering character motivations she wants to get across but doesn’t have the time or plot structure to support starting on just yet.

She looks over, ready to boast about just how great she’s been doing, and only then does she realize that he’s been tapping away at his keyboard the entire time as well.

Also, the kettle’s pealing from across the room. It’s shrill and once she’s heard it, nearly deafening. She pours them both a cup and tries not to think about this weird alternate universe where she’s been able to write more than she’s written in almost a full year in the span of two days. It can’t be a fluke, as they’re separated by a full week, and it’s not just helping her.

She spies Sheldon’s word count at something like seven thousand when they break for lunch. Or dinner, really. Her stomach’s too busy growling for her to bother making a distinction.

 

 **311.**

He shows up at seven forty-five at night on a Friday. She’s always been the kind of person that goes out on the weekends, but for some reason, her newfound ability to get all this material written being ripped away from her every Monday after dinner has kept her feeling entirely unsociable.

She knows it’s him before she even peeks through the fish-eye.

They don’t even discuss it. He comes back the next day.

And the next.

And the next.

 

 **  
318.**

She’s plopping a large slice of lasagna on his plate when she realizes he’s been here overnight and he’s wearing a different set of clothes than he was before.

“Were you wearing that yesterday?”

“No,” he says. He taps his bag, a larger one that she remembers him usually bringing. “I had a chapter to finish so I brought a change of clothes.”

“A change of…”

He stares at her innocently as he starts to take a few bites of the pasta. “Clothes,” he repeats.

“Oh, god. Are we dating?” she shrieks.

“What?” A piece of lasagna slips off the end of his fork back onto the plate. “Dating, as in boyfriend and girlfriend?”

She hangs her head.

“Absolutely not.” Before she can let out a sigh of relief, he has to ruin it. “I would never date someone like you.”

“Excuse me?” Maybe her hand reaches for the knife. She stops it before it actually grabs anything, but he didn’t seem to notice anyway. His chair screeches as he stands up, as if he was physically moved to protest her insinuation.

“You’re at least seven years younger than me. You don’t know how to pronounce Stieltjes. You probably don’t even know who The Green Lantern is.”

“Um, what are you even talking about. _I_ would never date someone like _you_ , not the other way around.” She walks up to him, nose to nose, eyes in slits. “And I know who Ryan Reynolds is, you asshole.”

He gasps, grabs his things and flees her apartment.

She eats the rest of his lasagna in a rage and sprawls out on her couch, afterwards, cursing his existence.

 

 **  
**319.**   
**

“I’m only here because I need to write,” he says, shortly.

“Fine.”

She finishes her book and it’s not even Christmas. If he weren’t such a dick, she would’ve hugged him. As it is, she just makes hot chocolate and emails her publisher with the good news.

 

 **  
326.  
**  
He finishes his book. It’s thee hundred pages longer than hers, but it’s been ten times the amount of time since he’s written. She calls it even.

He falls asleep there by accident and she doesn’t have the heart to wake him up on the day when he’s finally sent off his manuscript to their boss.

 

 **445.**

“So I understand this is your writing partner, Miss—?”

“Penny,” she cuts off Sheldon’s mother.

“And we’re not _partners_ ,” he interjects, annoyedly.

He sneers in her direction so severely that she can’t help but bump against his side with a grin.

His mother looks back and forth between the two with a suspicious, measured glare.

“But seriously, we just write together. Probably wouldn’t stay in the same room with each other if it weren’t for that.”

“So, you’re not a couple?” Sheldon’s sister (she only just found out he’s a twin and if they were a couple, Missy, that’s probably something she would’ve been told pretty early on, come on) asks, not having it.

“No.” She laughs. “Oh, god no. No. No way. No.”

Sheldon shakes his head in agreement.

“Just partners,” Penny clarifies for what feels like the eightieth time that night.

Maybe a dual book release party was really just their publishing company’s way of saving money after all. She hates to admit Sheldon was right, but this suddenly feels like an awful idea.

Except for all the press and excitement, this was really an awful idea.

“Just partners,” she echoes softly.

 

 **0.**

She turns in the manuscript she’s finished months in advance on the exact due date, just for some closure to whatever was happening over the past year before she met Sheldon.

In spite of Sheldon?

No, because she met him. She can’t even pretend like that wasn’t life-changing at this point.

Somewhere around negative twenty-nine days, she’s finally kissed him. Which felt like a mistake, but so did the last novel and that ended up on the New York Times best-sellers list, so there’s nothing about their relationship that makes sense.

Except the inscription on the ring his sister helps him pick out, two years later. _Partners, writing_.


End file.
